HANNAFORD: The tragedy of America divided by distrust

We turned up a side road in the back of beyond, my wife and I, where a signpost decorated with faded plastic flowers showed the way to what lay beyond the back of America’s rural beyond. Thickly wooded slopes gave way to a line of small acreages butted up against a creek. It’s red-state country; plain-folk who made their livings where they lived, or maybe from forestry or the railway we had just crossed. Small businesses here and there… Looked like somebody was making a go of a small sawmill. At the end of a driveway, eggs sold on the honour system; and Bibles offered for free, if you care to take one.A few Trump/Vance signs. Not within thirty miles of Ruby Creek Road, did we see a Harris/Walz sign.Yes. Ruby Creek Road, in northern Idaho. It takes you to Ruby Ridge, a few miles further on. At the Naples general store on old Highway 95, the owner suggested that the Weaver family, that still owns the place where federal agents shot Randy Weaver and killed his wife, his son and his dog, didn’t care for pilgrims at the site.“You’ll see a signpost with flowers. That’s where people stop.”Judy and I were not pilgrims, just visiting the area and moved by journalistic curiosity. And what happened to the Weaver family in August 1992 is their story, not ours. (For those who don’t recall the details, there’s far too much for this space. Try here, and here, and Linda Slobodian's take, here.)But for the purposes of exposition, army veteran Randy Weaver and his family were hard-working Christian fundamentalists, who distrusted the federal government and decided to retreat from Iowa to — well, the back of the back of beyond and live there quietly in the hope of surviving the apocalypse they “knew” was coming. However, Weaver’s outspoken critique of Washington had drawn federal attention. So too had his friendships with members of the Aryan Nations, a group defined by the FBI as a terrorist threat. For him, there would be no quiet repose amid northern Idaho's bucolic charms. He was persuaded by an undercover federal agent to sell him two sawn-off shotguns — one of those felonies we hear so much about these days, but in this case a real one.No doubt things would have gone better for the family had Weaver, in return for the charges being dropped, agreed to become a government informant. But he would not do so. Instead, he went to ground in his cabin in the woods.When federal agents came for him, they first encountered his 14-year-old son among the trees, together with Weaver's friend Kevin Harris and the family dog. Shots were fired. The dog was killed. Harris shot and killed an agent and the boy was shot dead, in the back, as he ran for the cabin.Later, an unarmed Vicki Weaver was shot dead in the doorway of her home during the 11-day siege..To satisfy our need to understand difficult events, we human beings have a tendency to force-fit facts according to our basic assumptions in life.So the comfortable blue-state interpretation of the siege at Ruby Ridge is that Randy Weaver was a religious nut whose distrust of the US government was irrational and above all, unjustified. Sorry about his wife, son and dog but a federal agent also died; Weaver was a fool and others paid the price.You can still believe that. But 30 years ago, the courts didn’t. Weaver was found innocent of all charges against him except that of failing to appear in court to answer the shotgun charges.He and Harris then successfully won multi-million dollar suits against the US government.The other force-fit, the red pill version, goes like this. What Donald Trump calls the ‘deep state’ has been in business for a long time. It favours the interests of wealthy elites over those who don’t belong to the elites and by the way, is capable of leading America into unjust foreign wars, while trampling upon the rights of American citizens at home. The money system is a racket, and no less a person than President Dwight Eisenhower warned America of the danger posed by the power and influence of the country’s enormous military-industrial complex: “The potential for the disastrous rise of misplaced power exists and will persist.”Many think the Vietnam War validated his fears.Certainly, the federal siege of a religious cult in Waco Texas in 1993, validated those of the Weavers: bulldozers and flamethrowers in the service of the US government incinerated 82 people inside the cult’s wooden compound. (Twenty five of them were children.)It was (and remains) the deadliest action by the US government against its own citizens since the Civil War. To his credit, then-president Bill Clinton genuinely regretted allowing the raid.But everybody got the point: More Americans had been killed in their own country by their own government than the commies killed in America during the entire Cold War. This spawned a massive militia movement that itself brought tragic results. .And so we come to this November's US election. It is much remarked and plainly evident that the country is sharply — even bitterly — divided. And the issue is one of trust.Roughly half of Americans have been told Trump can’t be trusted with democracy.Then there's the other half that doesn't trust the government that's in power now.Unfortunately, they have good reason. They don’t trust governments that export American jobs to China, whichever party is running the shop.They are also appalled that their president, who is sworn to protect America's borders, has allowed millions of illegal aliens — violent criminals among them — to swarm their southern border. To what end? To dilute wages? To create a permanent Democrat voting bloc?And why should a hard-working, constitution-minded American trust governments that in the name of some left-wing definition of equity, suspend law and order so that their cities become cesspools of drug-addicted homelessness, where businesses can’t operate for fear of being looted and citizens can’t walk down the street for fear of being attacked?The people of the area are courteous to strangers. We chatted for some time at the Naples general store. The consensus: “You know, at the time, people thought Weaver was a bit radical. After everything we’ve seen since, we’re thinking maybe he saw things before other people did.” ***I would be remiss if I did not conclude with this little-known fact. Randy Weaver’s daughter Sara believes in forgiveness.“I went 10 years without understanding how to heal" until becoming a born-again Christian, she told her local newspaper. "All bitterness and anger had to go," she said. "I forgave those that pulled the trigger."There is then, one encouraging story. It has to be pulled from what is otherwise a sobering — even disturbing— glimpse into the future of the republic that for all its troubles, remains the hope of the Earth. But it's there and those who admire America, must hope for that hope

HANNAFORD: The tragedy of America divided by distrust

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